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Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Just "friends"....?

It's very clear that the opposition to marriage in part comes from the unwillingness of the anti's to admit that we are the same as they are, that we feel the same as they do, and that there is nothing really and substantively different in the emotions of love. This is why they try to reduce our relationships to mere sex, which they can cast as icky, rather than acknowledging the depth and meaning of real relationship.

Those who argue that homosexuality is a choice view us, and view our relationships, as friendships either perverted or at best gone wrong. ...

You don’t hear that kind of language from our supporters any more. Only our opponents are clinging to that outmoded notion of choice. They think the whole debate over same-sex relationships is about our choice of friends. They still can’t, or won’t, imagine that the flood of emotions and connections that they recognize as love can occur between two people of the same sex. I’m sure that a lot of them don’t even think it’s demeaning to our relationships to view them as falling within the kind of choices we make about our friends. They want us to have friends. They just refuse to believe that the powerful and mysterious forces they remember and/or experience with love can happen, for some people, with members of their own sex, and are every bit as gratifying and amazing — are, in fact, the same thing they know so well.

This reminds me of a social occasion when Aaron and I bumped into former Senator George Allen. I introduced Aaron (not without extreme pleasure) as my husband. Allen asked where we had gotten married. When I said Massachusetts, he said: "So you all are trying to export marriage from Massachusetts to here." Nope, I said, because we cannot (this was before DC's marriage law came into effect). I then asked Allen why he would object to a committed, legally protected relationship in the first place. He answered, memorably, "I just want you to be friends."

Can you imagine anyone saying that a straight married couple?

But really, it all comes back to the "ickiness" that straight people feel about gay sex. Because they can't imagine wanting to do that, they assume that who we are is somehow defined by that. And at times I despair. Even though marriage equality has been the law in the Netherlands for 10 years, about half of the Dutch still are bothered by two men kissing in public.

And i don't understand it. If I see two people kissing, whether two men, or two women, or a straight couple, I think it's sweet.